The faculty members that advise Harvard's library have told their peers that …

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The problems with state funding may be hitting public schools hard, but even some parts of elite private institutions are feeling the sting of rising prices. That was the message sent by the Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council, which says the costs of subscriptions to major research journals "cannot be sustained." It says that the cost of these journals has gone up by 145 percent over the last six years and, if things continue at that pace, it'll be forced to cut back.

Just to put this in context, the total cost for subscriptions is $3.75 million a year. As of the end of the last fiscal year, Harvard's endowment was $32 billion. If it received a similar rate of return on its investments as it did last year, it would take it about five and a half hours for its endowment to cover this cost.

In any case, the Faculty Advisory Council is fed up with rising costs, forced bundling of low- and high-profile journals, and subscriptions that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's suggesting that the rest of the Harvard faculty focus on open access publishing. The statement calls on the faculty to "move prestige to open access" and to consider resigning if they're on the editorial board of a subscription journal.

None of this is binding, and there's a very good chance that if a researcher gets an opportunity to publish in Nature, they'll take it. But it's another sign of a general dissatisfaction with the current state of academic publishing, which was what spawned the open access movement originally, and has more recently given rise to a large boycott of the publisher Elsevier.

35 Reader Comments

Seriously, though. That statement, after making this sound like it's some sort of scandalous ripoff by the academic publishing industry, goes on to say:

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Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

35%? That's supposed to be some huge scandal? What that says is that using non-profit journals which provided the same services, would save something like 35%. Not factors of 10 or even 2 or even 1.5. While open journals sound great in principle, in practice, either they don't provide a similar level of services as traditional academic journals, or they have similar costs, which have to be absorbed somehow.

Part of the reason library subscription rates have gone so high, is that individual subscriptions have virtually disappeared. Not that long ago, individual researchers or groups would have their own subscriptions to journals. These days, journals are read on the web, and a university- or lab- wide subscription serves everyone together. So, journal costs are now coming entirely out of the library budget, rather than split between library budgets and various research grant expenses - presumably this could be partially remedied just by a re-allocation of overhead within the university.

The whole 'journal crisis' is an hugely inflated non-issue. As fil metioned, a 35% profit is pretty small, trimming the expenses there will not save much.

Additionally Journals actively provide important services such as editing and validation, which is why the journals charge for publishing. Openness clauses actually can make the situation worse by forcing two versions of documents into the published space. The original unedited 'open' publication and the polished, edited work published by the journal.

The whole 'journal crisis' is an hugely inflated non-issue. As fil metioned, a 35% profit is pretty small, trimming the expenses there will not save much.

Additionally Journals actively provide important services such as editing and validation, which is why the journals charge for publishing. Openness clauses actually can make the situation worse by forcing two versions of documents into the published space. The original unedited 'open' publication and the polished, edited work published by the journal.

Well, I think that's the point of pushing open-access _journals_. You still pay a publishing fee to cover editing, administration, printing (if anything actually goes on dead tree) and such, but then you are free to distribute the polished version yourself. The journal acts as a coordinator for peer review and editing, but does not demand that copyright on your work be turned over, and does not charge for electronic access.

Part of the reason library subscription rates have gone so high, is that individual subscriptions have virtually disappeared. Not that long ago, individual researchers or groups would have their own subscriptions to journals. These days, journals are read on the web, and a university- or lab- wide subscription serves everyone together. So, journal costs are now coming entirely out of the library budget, rather than split between library budgets and various research grant expenses - presumably this could be partially remedied just by a re-allocation of overhead within the university.

Full disclosure, I work in an academic library.

While I can't speak for the US in Canada individual subscriptions to journals died off more than a decade ago. This was the first cost saving measure everyone took because it was an obvious one. It also prevented individual departments from hoarding subscriptions. Even print subscriptions from 20 years ago had differential billing based on a university's FTE count. Not to mention that print material wore out and got lost and publishers rarely cut you a break on a second copy. In Canada the reality is most universities don't buy subscriptions themselves, instead they form large consortia groups with many different sized universities and make purchases as a group. This cuts down on the costs of negotiating and ensures smaller institutions get access to materials they couldn't otherwise afford. It also means more money for the publishers as prices are always based on FTEs. Publishers try and charge individual institutions variable rates for the same material not based their FTE count alone but on how much they think that institution can pay. Publishers have also moved to journal bundling to raise prices. They bundle journals that people want with ones that no one wants so they can bill more knowing full well you'll never use the others.

What does open access entail, exactly? I know that most schools pay a huge amount for student/faculty access (amongst other details), so what would change?

Also, what does a subscription get you beyond student/faculty-wide access?

Open access usually means no subscription required. Delayed access is also popular as an open access lite model. Delayed access is basically if you pay you get access day one otherwise they go open access is a 6 months or a year.

Some closed access publishers will give you what they term "perpetual access rights." Basically if they ever shut down the journal or you cancel your subscription they will send you everything you are entitled too in some format. They usually do this in such a way as to make the material as hard to use as possible so you don't terminate your subscription. As an example I have 800 CDs from one publisher in my office. There are no more than 3 files on any one CD and files aren't labeled with any information usable to discerning what article or journal the file belongs to.

Some closed access publishers will also provided you with MARC records for their journals or other metadata that can be useful dependening on what services you provided to students and faculty.

If Harvard is bellyaching about the cost of journal subscriptions, then they should pony the cost for the open-access options from individual PIs. Most journals allow (for an extra ~$3000-4000 per article) an open access option. But since publication costs are typically taken out of the grant (so federal money that is under the control of the PI) whereas subscription costs are ponied up by the university, this is just a shifting of the onus of pub costs to the PI's research budget.

Harvard is one of the beneficiaries of the current system. Their researchers publish in prestigious journals, which in turn allows them to get more grant money to publish more papers. What exactly do they think they're complaining about?

The whole 'journal crisis' is an hugely inflated non-issue. As fil metioned, a 35% profit is pretty small, trimming the expenses there will not save much.

Additionally Journals actively provide important services such as editing and validation, which is why the journals charge for publishing. Openness clauses actually can make the situation worse by forcing two versions of documents into the published space. The original unedited 'open' publication and the polished, edited work published by the journal.

I run a small medical library at a medium-sized hospital. I can tell you that this "non-issue" as you call it forced our library from purchasing print subscriptions altogether in 2009. We can no longer afford to pay what publishers want.

So now we have to rely on what we can get from public access databases, arXiv, PubMed Central, the local public library databases, free HighWire and ScienceDirect journals, Google Scholar, inter-library loans, and whatever else is available at no cost. This is what is driving the education of today's physicians.

Publisher subscription rates increase at a faster rate than the consumer price index and standard cost of living increases. This means that our finance department stopped approving budget increases to keep up with publisher price demands. And I can't blame them. It's an untenable situation.

We no longer have access to mainstream journals. And my library is not alone. Most hospital libraries are getting rid of print subscriptions, either involuntarily or to take a stand against such egregious business practices.

This, of course, creates a smaller subscriber base and even higher prices for the major institutions that are still subscribing. I am not surprised that Harvard Library made that statement. The publishing industry, as it is, will not be viable for long.

What does open access entail, exactly? I know that most schools pay a huge amount for student/faculty access (amongst other details), so what would change?

Also, what does a subscription get you beyond student/faculty-wide access?

Instead of paying to subscribe you pay to publish. Anyone who wants access to the journal can then do so without any fees, removing the issue of non-academics or retired academics being prevented from doing research and academics don't have to worry about doing research then running into a pay wall because their employer doesn't have a subscription to journal Y, just W, X and Z

The defense of the publishers is clear astroturfing. There is virtually no overhead with running a journal, if they're only at 35% profits, it's because the executives have spent more money on themselves in the budgets. Costs are rising because it's a broken market, not because costs are rising. Just tell me what has gotten more expensive, eh? Nothing. The costs of publishing have only gone down, not up. The idea that you have to pay hundreds of dollars to read someone's words is absurd and antiquated.

The journals only sell access to a prestigious name, which the current generation did nothing to create. The institutions should simply 'publish' under their institution names and rely on word of mouth and 3rd party social networks (i.e. facebook) to make important results known.

And public institutions should never have their content behind someone else's paywall, it's unethical. I've already paid for that content with my taxes for the express mission of public education, it should be freely available.

Let's put that in perspective. People complain about the high-markup on pharmaceuticals and medication. But even that industry is running at 15% less profit margin than publishers are.

How does that translate? Journal prices increase on average 7-10% per year! Given that the CPI and COLA are about 3-4% per year, this means that publishers are increasing their prices at double to triple the rates of other products on the market. No wonder they clear 35% margin!!

Let's see another example. Suppose gasoline had the same increase. A gallon that costs $3.00 this year will cost $3.30 next year. Then $3.63. Then $3.99. Within 10 years gasoline would run $7.07 a gallon. At fifteen years, gas would be $11.40 a gallon! (Of course, that's high end, but it's within the current range.) You get my point. It's not sustainable.

The only reason there are not outrages and boycotts over this right now is because the customer base for these products is small, usually limited to institutions. But almost all libraries are tax supported, so it's your tax dollars paying for this!

Most people don't know anything about this, but they should. When it happens in other industries, boycotts form and investigations begin. Why not here?

The whole 'journal crisis' is an hugely inflated non-issue. As fil metioned, a 35% profit is pretty small, trimming the expenses there will not save much.

Additionally Journals actively provide important services such as editing and validation, which is why the journals charge for publishing. Openness clauses actually can make the situation worse by forcing two versions of documents into the published space. The original unedited 'open' publication and the polished, edited work published by the journal.

Well, I think that's the point of pushing open-access _journals_. You still pay a publishing fee to cover editing, administration, printing (if anything actually goes on dead tree) and such, but then you are free to distribute the polished version yourself. The journal acts as a coordinator for peer review and editing, but does not demand that copyright on your work be turned over, and does not charge for electronic access.

Assuming you can afford the open-access publishing fee - the ones I've seen have been in the $K range. All of the journals I've published in have not charged the authors (unless you wanted colour illustrations in the print version).

Wisconsin state budget, $32 billion per year, population 5.7 million vs. 1.85 million, meaning $5614 per person vs. $2324. I live in Wisconsin, and currently special interests are trying to remove the governor because our spending is TOO LOW.

I know it's off topic, but it's building on an article that included some off-topic information in the main article, and an earlier post helped pull it even further off topic, but I find it a little depressing that I live in a state where the state budget alone, not counting local, is 13% of the GDP and that's seen as too low.

The whole 'journal crisis' is an hugely inflated non-issue. As fil metioned, a 35% profit is pretty small, trimming the expenses there will not save much.

Additionally Journals actively provide important services such as editing and validation, which is why the journals charge for publishing. Openness clauses actually can make the situation worse by forcing two versions of documents into the published space. The original unedited 'open' publication and the polished, edited work published by the journal.

"...important services such as editing and validation"? If by that you mean getting other researchers to referee the articles for free, on the dime of the reviewer's institute / university, then you're absolutely right. The least they could do is arrange a discount on subscription fees based on the frequency of reviews from each institute, but that just be far too generous on the part of publishing overlords (who by the way also take the copyright on all these articles).

35% might not be that bad if the sales, marketing and business people working at these journals weren't collecting fat cat salaries. "Would you like to do just one more review, sir? In your free time maybe? The sales director, whose salary is already 3X yours, needs that second yacht".

Wisconsin state budget, $32 billion per year, population 5.7 million vs. 1.85 million, meaning $5614 per person vs. $2324. I live in Wisconsin, and currently special interests are trying to remove the governor because our spending is TOO LOW.

I know it's off topic, but it's building on an article that included some off-topic information in the main article, and an earlier post helped pull it even further off topic, but I find it a little depressing that I live in a state where the state budget alone, not counting local, is 13% of the GDP and that's seen as too low.

It's always good practice to start you posts with a textbook ad hom, completely without support.

For the record, I do not, nor have I ever worked for an academic publisher (or any publisher), nor have I received payments of any kind from such a publisher.

I am, however, a scientist who has published in (and refereed for) several journals, both traditional and open access. My primary concern is for the integrity of the scientific process.

It concerns me a great deal that many of my younger colleagues are so eager to toss out a system (traditional academic publishing) that has served the scientific community, and the scientific process, reasonably well for a century, without understanding _why_ the process has (generally) worked.

Peer review is an essential part of the scientific process. While the reviewers themselves are usually volunteers, doing the process right requires a properly trained staff, a quality editorial board, and perhaps most importantly _the right incentive structure_.

The key problem, IMHO, with the open access journals is that they turn the traditional incentive structure on its head. Traditionally, most of a journal's costs are paid by the subscribers. Hence, the publisher's incentive is to produce a high quality, well-refereed, well-edited product which its subscribers (scientists and scientific institutions) will want to purchase. It's easy for the editors to reject papers which should be rejected (and are recommended for rejection by the referees), because their goal is to produce a quality, well-refereed product.

However, in an open access journal, the journal's costs are paid primarily by the authors themselves. One doesn't have to think too hard to see the potential problems with that. The authors are then journal's customers (rather than the subscribing academics and academic institutions), and the journal gets paid if and only if a paper is published. One ends up with a system in which there is a strong incentive for a journal to publish everything that is submitted to it, while cutting back as much as possible on costs associated with refereeing and editing. As a result, fewer papers are rejected or even well refereed, many articles are published full of obvious errors. Competition between such journals will tend to further weaken the standards for publication and weaken the effort spent on refereeing/editing. The standard for whether work gets published or not then quickly becomes simply a matter of whether or not one can pay the journal fees, and can end up having little to do with the actual quality of the research. One can already see the effects of a collective lowering of standards across scientific publishing.

Now, above perhaps I have exaggerated a bit for emphasis, but hopefully the point is clear. One must be cautious about simply tossing out a system that has served the scientific community well (on the whole) for over a century. Before doing so, think carefully about what if required for the scientific process to work, and think carefully about the incentive structure created by any proposed new way of doing things.

It concerns me a great deal that many of my younger colleagues are so eager to toss out a system (traditional academic publishing) that has served the scientific community, and the scientific process, reasonably well for a century, without understanding _why_ the process has (generally) worked....

(For the record, I am a medical librarian.)

I do agree with your assessment of the peer review system and the perils of pay-for-publishing. Studies are always given weight and reputation based on the journal they are published in. I personally separate my research queries into two groups: primary and secondary journals. I let my patrons know which articles came from top-tier journals with high impact factors and which came from secondary journals that may not have such a priority on peer-review. This is important to know.

People pay more for JAMA, NEJM, Lancet, and BMJ because they know they are getting top quality, well-respected authors and fully-fleshed, colleague-scrutinized articles. Lesser title cannot command that respect or those prices.

However, I believe publishers are using the peer-review system to leverage high prices, two items that are really separate in nature. There should be a way to reduce prices on publications and still maintain academic integrity.

Continually increasing publisher prices are forcing institutions to use alternative access resources that don't have the same standards of excellence.

In other words, it's not peer-review that people want to do away with, it's high subscription costs. Peer-review is just a casualty of war.

Wisconsin state budget, $32 billion per year, population 5.7 million vs. 1.85 million, meaning $5614 per person vs. $2324. I live in Wisconsin, and currently special interests are trying to remove the governor because our spending is TOO LOW.

I know it's off topic, but it's building on an article that included some off-topic information in the main article, and an earlier post helped pull it even further off topic, but I find it a little depressing that I live in a state where the state budget alone, not counting local, is 13% of the GDP and that's seen as too low.

So I guess Wisconsin's spending doesn't look abnormally high after all. Although to see the whole picture someone might need to look at the local figures too in case the spending is divided differently in each state.

I'm curious, what would a mass exodus from published-for-profit journals have on peer review? I could see an argument being made that democratization of the process would be a good thing...

The actual peer reviewers are rarely paid. They generally do it for the prestige related to the being involved with the journal.

As far as I know, no legitimate journal pays its peer reviewers. That would create a conflict of interest. There's also no real prestige associated with reviewing a paper. The reviewers are anonymous, at least in theory, and the reviews are almost never seen after acceptance.

People do peer review as a service to their discipline. It's time-consuming, and the only upside is that it keeps publication quality reasonably high, at least in the sense that most articles don't suck.

I do agree with your assessment of the peer review system and the perils of pay-for-publishing. Studies are always given weight and reputation based on the journal they are published in. I personally separate my research queries into two groups: primary and secondary journals. I let my patrons know which articles came from top-tier journals with high impact factors and which came from secondary journals that may not have such a priority on peer-review. This is important to know.

So, I realize that most research in medicine is low N with relatively poor controls. Given that most medical doctors know little about statistics, I can understand how the reputation of medical journals would serve as a reasonable proxy for quality.

There are other fields out there. A lot of them. With good controls. And, in these other fields, impact factor has little to do with the quality of the work, and everything to do with the perceived significance of the work, and the politics in the field.

J. Phys. Chem. B publishes a ton of solid papers every year. It's a standard go-to journal for the field, and its articles are well-respected. It has an impact factor of 3.6. Nature has an impact factor of 36.1. Does this mean that an article in Nature is 10x more reliable than one in JPC B? No. Nature and Science have published utter crap before. Some of the work in JPC B has been truly outstanding.

In other words, it's not peer-review that people want to do away with, it's high subscription costs. Peer-review is just a casualty of war.

I've never seen a serious academic advocate getting rid of peer review. I've published with Biomed Central (an open-access publisher) before, and the peer review was just as rigorous as any other journal.

So, I realize that most research in medicine is low N with relatively poor controls.

?? - Never heard that before.

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Given that most medical doctors know little about statistics, I can understand how the reputation of medical journals would serve as a reasonable proxy for quality.

Actually, I find that most of them are quite capable with statistical interpretation. And journal reputation is important in any field, not just medicine.

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J. Phys. Chem. B publishes a ton of solid papers every year. It's a standard go-to journal for the field, and its articles are well-respected. It has an impact factor of 3.6. Nature has an impact factor of 36.1. Does this mean that an article in Nature is 10x more reliable than one in JPC B? No. Nature and Science have published utter crap before. Some of the work in JPC B has been truly outstanding.

I didn't mean to imply that Impact Factor was was the end-all of journal comparison. Simply that it has validity when comparing the quality of unknown titles. With tens of thousands of journals available, it's not possible to know each one. So when I see a result in the Kai Tiki Journal of Osteozoology (made up), a journal I have never heard of, I use the Impact Factor to get a feel for its relevance.

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I've never seen a serious academic advocate getting rid of peer review. I've published with Biomed Central (an open-access publisher) before, and the peer review was just as rigorous as any other journal.

I never said that anyone wants to do away with peer review. I stated that if there is a mass exodus to open access forums in order to avoid high publishers prices, the peer-review system (which is not always a given in open access forums) may take a hit and article quality may drop.

Yes, some open access forums have a good peer-review system, such as BMC. But many do not, and this is where quality will drop. Peer-review is a necessary component of the information world. We should not be so quick to jump on the free-for-all bandwagon and abandon a system that has served well for hundreds of years. It needs fixing, not dismissing.

35%? That's supposed to be some huge scandal? What that says is that using non-profit journals which provided the same services, would save something like 35%. Not factors of 10 or even 2 or even 1.5. While open journals sound great in principle, in practice, either they don't provide a similar level of services as traditional academic journals, or they have similar costs, which have to be absorbed somehow.

This has already been pointed out, but 35% gross margins are huge for most industries. Second, you're not factoring in all the accounting tricks that publishers use to keep their profit numbers down to avoid taxes. So actual savings could be substantially higher than 35%.

The whole system is basically an Emperor-has-no-clothes situation. Colleges, universities, and tax paying citizens are currently the ones funding the faculty who write and review all of these publications. The publishers are doing what is essentially clerical work, and yet they demand to hold the copyright on articles in exchange for this "valuable" service.

What Harvard (or MIT, or Caltech... you get the idea) needs to do is put together a consortium of top-tier research universities who would all agree to launch a new line of "prestige" online open-access publications, and require their faculty to publish in those, or at least require they cross-publish to them. Once the big name labs are all publishing to these new journals, everyone will flock to them.

So, I realize that most research in medicine is low N with relatively poor controls.

?? - Never heard that before.

I don't mean to be snarky. I've noticed that a lot of people associated with medical research seem to forget that there are other fields out there, and that the nature of inquiry in these other fields is qualitatively different than in medicine. In medicine, research is largely limited to asking if drug/device X show a signficant difference compared to placebo. A lot of investigations don't even bound effect size. Often, there's no real way to understand why the effect exists. This isn't true in other fields; in other fields, research really tries to probe the mechanism of a change or process.

Compare almost all medical research to, say, gas-phase molecular dynamics. In gas-phase MD experiments, two beams of molecules are crossed in a vacuum, and a mass spectrometer collects the products at various solid angles from one of the beams. Each count on the mass spec is an independent measurement. Each run of the experiment generates tens or hundreds of thousands of independent measurements.

Compared to this, medical research has *very* low N.

In gas-phase MD, chopper wheels are used to limit the velocities of the reactants and the products. The products enter the chamber at a super-cooled temperature. Because of these conditions, the distribution of initial kinetic and potential energies (quantum states) is well-characterized and narrow. The chopper wheel at the mass-spec allows a narrow band of kinetic energies. From this, the potential energy of the products can be obtained with high precision, allowing the quantum states of the products to be determined.

Compared to this, medical research has *very* poor controls.

I'm not pointing this out to criticize medical research (mostly). A lot of this is just the nature of the work. The system (a human) is complex, heterogeneous, and has its own agency. Because doctors cannot control for all of the varying factors, they're left using statistical controls. The cost of making a single measurement is high (really, really high compared to physical science), and its time-consuming. So the N is much lower.

However, it does piss me off when medical researchers forget that basic science is quite different.

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Given that most medical doctors know little about statistics, I can understand how the reputation of medical journals would serve as a reasonable proxy for quality.

Actually, I find that most of them are quite capable with statistical interpretation. And journal reputation is important in any field, not just medicine.

I'm reacting, largely, to the overuse of impact factor in hiring, tenuring, and compensation of faculty. It's a pretty poor measure of actual impact, and it has become really wide-spread. Comments similar to yours are often used to defend these practices. As for doctors and stats, I only hope that your experience is more typical than mine.

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I didn't mean to imply that Impact Factor was was the end-all of journal comparison. Simply that it has validity when comparing the quality of unknown titles. With tens of thousands of journals available, it's not possible to know each one. So when I see a result in the Kai Tiki Journal of Osteozoology (made up), a journal I have never heard of, I use the Impact Factor to get a feel for its relevance.

While I see your point, I don't really agree. Journals, especially small ones, routinely game the impact factor. I think it's far more important to look at the citations of the paper, and the body of work of the authors. There are newer metrics (similar to Google PageRank) designed to do this algorithmically, but they still aren't widely used.

Yes, some open access forums have a good peer-review system, such as BMC. But many do not, and this is where quality will drop. Peer-review is a necessary component of the information world. We should not be so quick to jump on the free-for-all bandwagon and abandon a system that has served well for hundreds of years. It needs fixing, not dismissing.